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FreeNAS 8.0 approaches with RC2

Just over one week after RC1 was issued, the FreeNAS developers have announced the arrival of a second release candidate (RC2) for version 8.0 of FreeNAS, a FreeBSD-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) UNIX-like server operating system. FreeNAS includes a full Web configuration graphical user interface (GUI) and supports the FTP, NFS, CIFS (Samba), AFP, rsync and iSCSI protocols and software RAID (0,1,5).

According to the developers, release candidate 2 addresses several issues encountered in the previous RC and features support for GUI firmware upgrades, noting that, due to "a bug in the interaction between FreeBSD, lighttpd and Python, they work intermittently" – a workaround for the bug has been found but wasn't implemented in time for the RC2 release. Compared to previous versions, FreeNAS 8.0 is more modular and includes a redesigned graphical user interface (GUI) built using Python and the Django web framework that's aimed at making the OS easier to use.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.